This chapter investigates the uses to which climate is put in a range of Nordic noir novels and films. In the majority of such texts, climate functions as both a feature of particular locales (usually, the stark meteorological and ecological settings associated with the Nordic lands) and a way to emphasise or otherwise give aesthetic expression to human actions. Strikingly, however, a small number of texts could be identified as what Linda Rugg terms ‘ecocrime’ fiction. In these, non-human nature appears as an actant in its own right, for it figures as the victim of crime. However, criminal investigation in these texts is displaced from non-human to human victims, thus deferring inquiry into the non-human and underlining non-human nature as an aporia of meaning or as the site of trauma.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.